Kisumu field site

The IEIP-Kenya field site in Kisumu is impressive. The project has renovated a government training facility and made it its field office. Each building is an office for a different IEIP research or surveillance project. The main project is an active population-based surveillance study for severe acute respiratory illness, diarrheal disease, acute febrile illness and jaundice. In practical terms, that means that community interviewers go out into the community every day with a list of households they are assigned to visit. The lists are designed so that each household is visited once a week. During each visit, the community interviewers ask the head of the household questions about the health of each member of the household - whether they experienced any symptoms of illness, whether they were taken to a health care facility, etc.

In addition to collecting data at the household level, data are collected the health care facility in Lwak. St. Elizabeth's Hospital is a private hospital with which IEIP has partnered. IEIP has helped expand and remodel the facility and now provides some staff to assist the sisters who run the hospital. All community members who are enrolled in the household surveillance project receive free health care at the hospital, though other members of the community are able to seek care at the hospital as well. The data collected here are later linked to the household data to try to provide a complete picture of disease circulation and etiologies in the community.